


wasp jerky

by poodlepaws (Nausicaa_E)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Bratting, Choking, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Enemies With Benefits, Eye Trauma, Gore, Hate Sex, I do not apologize for anything in this fic., It/Its Pronouns for The Distortion (The Magnus Archives), Nursery Rhyme References, Other, Parasites, Trans Jane Prentiss, Unhealthy Kismesissitude, Unhealthy Relationships, Worms, but also literal sex, gee Naus how come your fic lets you reference TWO nursery rhymes, the third thing AO3 pulls up when you type "unhealthy" is, which i guess applies, woodworm infestation as metaphor for sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:54:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25038067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nausicaa_E/pseuds/poodlepaws
Summary: The Distortion could get along with Jane Prentiss. It doesn't. They have a good time anyway.
Relationships: Jane Prentiss/"Michael" The Distortion
Comments: 8
Kudos: 29





	wasp jerky

     _There was a crooked ma_ _n …_
    The crooked man’s name was not Michael. But it was tall, and had long blond hair, and a round face, unless you looked at it through a crooked glass, in which case it was very tall, and its hair drifted out in a thousand crooked directions, and its face was as round and mad as the moon.
    

* * *

    _And he walked a crooked mile …_
    
    
    If you looked at the crooked man who was not named Michael through a crooked glass, you would also see its huge crooked hands, and its long crooked legs, and if you saw it walking through a crooked glass, you would not like to look at what it was walking _along._ Carpet would roll under it, like an arriving king, in bilious colors and patterns that would make you long for the simple queasiness of vertigo or seasickness or disgust. Its way would wend, and wind, and send up the walls of a hallway around its feet, although there would never be any _outside_ to the hallway, as the crooked man was very much a creature of _insides_.
    

* * *

    
    
    _He found a crooked sixpence …_
    The crooked man was walking down a lovely country road, heavy with pollen and the buzzing of bees. It had a destination in what might be called its mind, although it did not approach it as a non-crooked man would. It would perhaps be more appropriate to say that it was walking down _all_ the lovely country roads, spread out as a drifting chance, looking for the places where the roads filled with trash and roadkill, and then choosing to be the chance where it was walking down the paths of rot and pollution.
    

* * *

    
    
    _Upon a crooked stile …_
    The crooked man found what it was looking for when it passed by a broken-down farmhouse. There, the bees buzzed listlessly, the trash piled high with black mold and gangrene, and the _ants_ … the ants _swarmed_ everywhere. The crooked man turned off the road, and stopped. The place stank with a power that in any other hour, the crooked man would be proud to call a friend – like the crooked man, that power had a way of getting under your skin and eating you from the inside out – but which, right now, the crooked man hated in a way that was far more man-ish than crooked. If it had admitted when it was being less crooked and when it was being more of a man, it might have been able to simply wade through the wilting grass and enter the farmhouse directly, but as it was, the doorframes of the house were too rotten, the bees as yet untouched by colony collapse disorder, and the ants … ants didn’t go mad.
    

* * *

    
    
    _He bought a crooked cat …_
    The crooked man smiled a crooked smile to itself. It would have to be _clever_. It stood very still, and decided to not make a choice on this road as opposed to another a few millimeters and a universe away. It decided to not be here or there. It annoyed the bees no end, caused the house to squat even more cancerously in the land, and, well – it didn’t bother the ants. Ants are very certain creatures, which was what the crooked man was counting on. Certainty, as the crooked man had learned at the place of clarity and sight, was so _easily_ distracted.
    

* * *

    
    
    _Which caught a crooked mouse …_
    One of the rotting doors of the farmhouse creaked open, and disgorged the crooked man. Its carpet spilled out onto soiled floorboards.
    It laughed a crooked laugh. “ _Jane_ , darling! It’s a _mess_ in here!”
    Something raised its head. It had looked like another mass of rotten wood, with perhaps something red discarded on it, but as it got, piece by piece, to its feet, it revealed itself as a woman in a red dress, the woman and the dress both riddled with holes. _Shapes_ writhed behind the holes, and they all turned to look at the crooked man, whose name was not Michael.
    “ _What_ ,” writhed the worms that were inside the woman, who was still called Jane Prentiss, although she didn’t go in for things like _names_ these days, “do you _want_?”
    “Can’t I check up on an old friend?” The crooked man was acting man-ish enough that it could perhaps safely be referred to as Michael, so it was Michael that grinned a wide, wide, grin.
    “Here to fill us with _doubt_ and _riddles_?” writhed the worms that were inside Jane. “The hive sings louder than your wallpaper whispers.”
    Michael sighed, falsely, and wrapped an arm around the woman’s shoulders once or twice. It tapped a long, long finger on her arm, stabbing into her holes casually, once, twice, pulling out a worm with a tiny squishing sound and a hissing tremor of rage from the worms. “Jane, Jane, _Jane_. I’m _suf_ fering here, and not an _ounce_ of sympathy? _I_ thought you were _all_ about _love_ and _care_!”
    “We care about our _own_ ,” writhed the worms. “And about that which we can make a _home_ in. _You_ are shallow and barren, luring fools with fractals and offering nothing but more delusion. There is nowhere in your halls that anything can _live_.”
    Michael put a hand against its forehead, and leaned against Jane, whose worms were not strong, and let her crumble a little under its weight. “And _that’s_ why you’re the one vice I can’t kick, Jane darling!”
    The worms laughed; Jane coughed up another fragment of lung. “ _We’re_ the vice?”
    Michael draped itself over Jane’s shoulders, and stretched a hand down behind Jane, its fingers passing through the holes in her dress and teasing at the ones in her spine. The worms crawled away from the questing fingers, trembling with something that was not altogether rage. “Jane’s such a _pretty_ name, you know? So … _simple_. So _beautiful_. So many _hidden depths._ ”
    What remained of Jane Prentiss said, autonomously, “Thanks, I chose it myself.”
    “You chose _well_!” Michael slipped one finger into her back, and turned it through all the twisting tunnels of her body that were a home for so many wriggling things, and it popped out of her collarbone to reach up and tap her on the cheek. She shivered; the worms crawled and bit at a finger that was all bone, but nonetheless shivered in return. “A pretty name for a pretty thing – oh, I’m _sorry_ , thing _s_ , plural – like you…”
    “A minute ago you called us a _vice_ ,” writhed the worms.
    “The best vices are the pretty ones, Jane! It’s why I keep _crawling_ back.” Michael laid its head against hers. Its hair crawled as much as hers did (what was left of her hair).
    “And _what_ about me could sicken something like _you_?” She pressed a rotten hand to Michael’s chest, and she felt its flesh curl into the shape of her fingerprints and then go deeper.
    It smiled, knowing that it was not possible for it to look innocent, and not trying in the slightest. “Everyone _says_ you’re _tox_ ic, Jane! You get into me, you eat me up … and yet, and _yet_ , it feels _so_ nice, and I’m _help_ less against you! I _know_ , we’ve had our _disagreements_ …”
    Jane could be strong when her worms were not, and she threw Michael away. It landed inside the floor, and it was not pleasant to watch it shudder and reform outside it, lounging along its carpet and batting its mad, round eyes. “What do _you_ get out of it, you piece of shit?” writhed the worms.
    “The feeling of something _real_ inside me. Just like you said! I’m _shallow_ and you … you fill me up.”
    Jane knew that Michael was trying to make her mad. The worms didn’t care. They threw her onto it, and she dripped worms onto its face. Tendrils of hair stabbed at the worms, and she and the worms shuddered with an emotion that was swiftly leaving rage behind. “Let’s see you tell your _pretty lies_ with a throat full of _worms_ , _wallpaper boy_.”
    Michael opened its mouth to speak, in which the worms might have taken grim delight if there wasn’t Jane enough to know that it was getting _exactly_ what it wanted. Still, the worms poured out of Jane’s throat and into Michael’s, and she could _feel_ the winding paths they took inside it, feel their confusion and terror as the twists of whatever Michael had inside it separated the worms, cutting them off from the hive. More worms poured in, though, and they found that there was still something like flesh, places where they could burrow, make their own paths, force themselves in and make a _home_.
    Rotting lips tangled with lips that curled off of the jaw, and then Jane pulled back. When had the carpet, the wallpaper, the rows of mirrors taken over the rotting old house? When had Michael pulled her and her hive into its hallways? She put a rotting hand to Michael’s throat, ignoring how it twisted, how Michael continued to smile. “Oh, that’s how you want to play?”
    “Guilty as charged!”
    “Then let’s _play_.”
    

* * *

    
    
     _A_ _nd they all lived together …_
    An infestation in a house is something like a war. Here, we see the seething ranks of the conqueror worm, plotting their next attack, searching for the house’s weak points. There, we see the house’s guerillas laying traps, figuring out how to call for help from outside allies, signalling that something is wrong.
    In the crooked hallways that Michael was part of, there were no allies. No cleaning products, no poisoned bait, no exterminators to call. But there were other defenses. There were dead-ends, twists and turns, ways to separate the worms from each other, to split their forces. There were patterns of wallpaper that were irresistible, promising holes where they could hide and then pulling them in, making them curl and twist until they were part of the walls.
    But the worms found wood to eat or turn into pulp, and hives blistered in the terrible corners that always, always turned right, and the hallways pulsed and throbbed with the song of the hive even when the crooked hallways closed themselves off into loops. The worms charged down the hallways, leaving trails of filth in their hurry to eat and breed and inhabit, and the hallways shivered at their passing.
    The hallways had one defense left: to become less real. But, somehow, it never seemed to muster the effort. The sticky, maddening heat of the hallways never became too feverish. The visual distortions were only slight, the worms still recognizable as worms instead of the floating specks in front of your eyes. The hallways never collapsed into maddening fields of color and number and shape that suggested truth without ever revealing it. The hallways stayed physical, and let the worms fester within them, each shuddering and alive.
    And in what might be called a foyer had it anything that distinguished it from any other section of the hallways, very close to where a door opened into a ruined old house, two bodies that had once had humans inside them wrestled, or did something similar.
    Michael’s corkscrew fingers danced inside Jane’s hole-riddled body, and the worms nipped and kissed at them. Jane shivered and gasped at the teasing suggestions of something more, and then redoubled her efforts to fill Michael with her worms, to make it a hive, to fill it with as many holes as she had. Michael caused her dress to flicker between colors until it was no color and was gone, and she chewed through the clothes it may or may not have been wearing. Michael’s body thrashed under her like someone trying to scratch an itch, and she pinned it down and pushed inside it, transfixing it with her awful, messy reality.
    
    It could have been minutes. It could have been a week. (It wasn’t either of those things.) Michael’s body leaked from the joy of it –
    The worms crawled in. The worms crawled out. Up, up, into Michael’s stomach as she pressed into it. Out, out of his mouth as it moaned and laughed and felt just how much life there was within her – within them, now, too, bubbling out of its nose like laughter –
    Worms ate Michael’s curling eyes. Worms ate the nose off its face until it was a mirror to the ghastly one that leaned down and kissed it, hard, like it had offended her (which it had) –
    Michael’s toes curled. Jane was so soft with decay and so hard with hate and the complexity was _its_ domain, and it recognized itself in her and her in it, and as one giant worm her vicious satisfaction filled it up to its stomach and through its spiralling eyesocket –
    Its stomach burst with the rapture of it, and Jane and all her worms sang in rotten victory.
    (And Michael? Well, it got what it wanted.)
    

* * *

    
    
    
     _I_ _n a little crooked house._
    The hallways ebbed away, and the old rotten farmhouse came back.
    “So, was it good for you?” burbled Michael, its ruined body scabbing over like a Cubist painting.
    “Stop talking,” said Jane, the worms humming softly. She wrapped an arm around a torso that she would _not_ let twist away from her. “Shut up and cuddle.”
    “I’m being cuddled by hives all along my corridors. They’ll last me through the long, cold win–” Jane plunged a fist into Michael’s mouth, silencing it.
    (It had been good for her.)

**Author's Note:**

> me, at the dinner table last night: [jane prentiss voice] there is a wasp's nest. in my pussy  
> my darling partner [forsyte](https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsyte/), after thirty seconds of wheezing: [....wasp jerky](https://orcinuss.tumblr.com/post/619994253213433856)  
> me: FUCK i have to write this now!
> 
> The specific variant of the Hearse Song referenced is Summer Raye's [here](http://www.alsirat.com/deathlore/worms.html).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] wasp jerky](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26179597) by [Yvonne (connect_the_stars)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/connect_the_stars/pseuds/Yvonne)




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